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CD Mention
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Newsday (NYC), CD Mention >>
Sound for the Season
- By Marty Lipp
believe it was best said by that sagacious, late-20th century philosopher — Mungo Jerry: In the summertime, "we're all hap-hap-py." Once the warm weather hits, we can barely contain ourselves — literally: We cook outside, we sleep outside, we listen to music outside. Maybe it's our thinned blood, or the beverages we use to get it that way, but we seem less constricted, more open to new sounds. How else to explain our penchant for glomming onto "summer songs," those silly tunes that are the perfect soundtrack to our youthful indiscretions?
Outdoor summer festivals, in particular, offer easy opportunities to introduce your suddenly pliable mind to great music from around the world.
Angelique Kidjo brings her spunky Afropop to the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center Aug. 5 and Central Park SummerStage Aug. 12. Kidjo, who left Benin for Paris and Brooklyn, recently released "Djin Djin (Razor & Tie)," a briskly efficient collection of her international style. The album has several guest musicians, including Peter Gabriel, Alicia Keys and Josh Groban, her summer tourmate. (They stop at Nassau Coliseum July 25.)
Kidjo's music easily matches the energy of any number of rock groups, but it is less about crescendo and grandiosity than it is about fostering and main¬
taining cozy grooves. Kidjo's take on the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" is a case in point. Gone are the ominous pounding drums and Merry Clayton's paint-peeling shouts of warning, replaced by Kidjo and Joss Stone soulfuUy crooning at the center ofa polyrhythmic wall of sound.
Kidjo has created albums inspired by the music of Brazil, the U.S. and the Caribbean, but on "Djin Djin," Kidjo has synthesized her influences for a sound that is at once accessible,but made up of elements that span half the globe. She teams with Carlos Santana, a South African vocal group, the Malian blues team Amadou & Mariam, reggae's Ziggy Marley and ends with her own version of Ravel's "Bolero."
Another musician from a small country, Andy Palacio, released a breakthrough album earlier this year, "Watina" (Cumbancha). I've written about Palacio before, but the album is a wonderful update of rhythms and vocal styles from the African-descended people called the Garifuna, a minority community in sever-
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al Central American countries. Palacio made his name playing the dance-oriented punta rock, but his new music is for the heart, not the hips. Still, it is a lively album that doesn't get bogged down as it delivers some poignant soulfulness. Palacio brings his multi-generational ensemble to S.O.B.'s Thursday and for free shows at the Huntington Arts Council's Summer Festival in Heckscher Park next Saturday and to the Metrotech Center in
Brooklyn Thursday at noon.
The Lincoln Center Out-ofDoors series in August always lets the institution unstuff its stuffiness and present music from outside its usual world. In its 24th annual Roots of American Music series, it presents traditional music with a twist, teaming Ricky Skaggs ofthe bluegrass world with Brooklyn's Andy Statman Aug. 19. The Brooklyn-based Statman has developed an improbable dual career playing bluegrass on mandolin and exploring spiritual Hasidic music on clarinet.
Another unusual lineup at Lincoln Center, on Aug. 20, is Irish singer and folklorist Mick Moloney playing with classic jazz revivalists Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. The bill is given another twist with openers Les Yeux Noirs, a high-energy acoustic band from France that takes klezmer and Gypsy music for a spin.
At the Aug. 11 African Festival of the Celebrate Brooklyn series in Prospect Park, the headliners are Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars, a group of musicians who formed in a refugee camp to keep their spirits up, and eventually became the subject ofa documentary and a worldwide success. 06/24/07
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